


Wires and Stars: Incipisphere Intermission

by tatterdemalionAmberite (amberite), titianArchivist



Series: Wires and Stars [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Derse, Dream Shenanigans, Kink Negotiation, Multi, Omens & Portents, Painplay, Prospit, Psychic Bond, Retcon, Rough Sex, SGRUB, T.S. Eliot - Freeform, The Waste Land, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-12 03:20:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/pseuds/tatterdemalionAmberite, https://archiveofourown.org/users/titianArchivist/pseuds/titianArchivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Sollux Captor and you remember the lines of code that bracketed the apocalypse. You remember fighting and fucking and mourning; you remember dying and living on.</p><p>This is the way it never happened. This is the story of everything you saw, and the decision you made, and how it changed you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Game of Chess

**Author's Note:**

> [This follows directly after Initiation. The explicit content begins in the second chapter, and the rating will be revised upward when that is posted.]
> 
>  _And we shall play a game of chess,_  
>  _Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door._  
>  \--T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

Dreaming, but not in the dreamspace - far from that sense of lucidity, quasi-reality. There is golden light and a sound like wind on reeds. You hover in stillness, though the distant wind carries a faint sound like that of bells, all kinds of different bells ringing at once.

You fly.

Not with the buzzing force of your psionics, but aimless floating - it happens without really trying; you think at things and move closer to them, gradual, a sort of rhythmless drifting from the gilt-trimmed window of your room, along the enormous chain, to walk in the streets of the city.

The surreal quality of your awareness reminds you of something terrible, and it takes you moments to realize that what it's reminding you of is the hours after you killed Aradia, the slow surfacing from Vriska's control, and remembering that jolts you into thinking straight. 

For a while. It’s easy to be pulled back into mindlessness, into drifting through soft dark air over golden streets, and it feels more like actually being asleep than any of the other kinds of lucid dreaming you've experienced.

This is Prospit, and you are finally here, in the right place, at the right time. Locked away from waking; locked away from the part of you that’s anchored to the waking world, the part of you that constructs the dreamspace, that can pull him to you -

And you feel oddly... flat. Like even beyond the problem of these missing pieces, you can only find half of yourself. You won't know why for a while. ( _Shhh. It doesn't matter._ )

Skaia whirls above. Visions form and unform in the clouds, but you can’t resolve them, or rather, you feel a recognition, a back-of-thinkpan tickle for each one as of something remembered and suddenly forgotten.

You've seen the code that makes up this reality, an underpinning of the universe. The comments are particularly strange for this section. They say:

/* initiates/terminates paradox loop */

and they're dated to... Now that you think of it, tonight's date. The code loop is a kind that would be alarming to the novice, exactly the sort of thing you think of as an example of what makes ~ATH such a killer language, that it thrives on constructions which would break a program written in anything else.

Suddenly there's a rippling in the sky, and the distant plateau takes on a new set of convolutions, expands in dimension, clouds clearing.

It triggers first stillness, then commotion. The strange hornless, hairless people you see walking about the streets - they look like chessmen brought to life - start walking with direction and purpose, and in minutes it becomes like watching your bees organize themselves in response to a stimulus. Somehow they've mustered into units, standing, marching, preparing. 

You know the code that makes this happen: in broad strokes, at least, even if you don't feel you understand it. Your friends, outside, must be prototyping their kernelsprites. 

The streets shake with motion. You feel exposed, between the mustering of armies and the too-bright golden light, and then the voices start in.

You can hear them crying out in waves, even here, and you clutch your head and drop to the flagstones. One meteorite falling, then the next, the doom of Alternia -

That part, you understand, but it doesn't make it easier.

You want to disappear. No, more than that. You want to find out what's happening, but you don't want to ask strangers. You gather yourself, stumble to your feet, are twice almost knocked over by the frantic traffic of the living chessmen - walk up the edges of the main road, avoiding the path of the armies. There's a tall castle in the near distance, and you make for there. It seems to be the focus of massive amounts of activity; you could hardly miss it.

The first door you open takes you into a corridor of brass mirrors, where you wander for a time, lost, seeing visions in the reflecting frames, and when you emerge into back hallways, servants blink at you but talk to each other. A dusty back doorway takes you into what seems to be a library, towering shelves full of paper books - and that's the kind of thing you rarely toy with, but it's something you _know_. Information is information, and you go inside.

 _The Prophecies Concerning the Coming of the Twelve_ looks kind of interesting until you realize it's one volume of many, and written in an unfamiliar dialect. You're looking for something to distract you from the voices, and this is not that. _Frog Genetics for the Naive Chump_ is a little more engaging but your half-assed prophetic sense doesn't think it'll be terribly useful; and you're just about to pull down _Reconstituted Timelines in Theory and Practice_ off the shelf when your back prickles with the feeling of being watched, and you turn around.

There's someone there. You think a girl, if they're as much like a troll as they look, although the skin is different and the eyes are different and there are no horns. Her hair is like a photographic negative. But she doesn't look like a chesspiece. She's wearing garb like yours, only it's a bright pink-purple color, almost Tyrian except quite a bit lighter and more garish. 

She has the same flickering unreal quality as the visions in the clouds, but she's not distant; rather, so near you could touch her. If she was a troll she would be five or six sweeps, your age or a little bit younger; but since she's not a troll, you don't know; she could be weeks old or millennia. 

But she's _not_ actually watching you, as far as you can see. She's holding a book. You're not sure if it's one of the books from the shelves or a ghostly book of her own, and you reach over and prod.

"Hey!" she says. "Excuse you. I was writing that."

"That's funny. Usually people say they were reading." You're going to take the apparition on her own terms, even if you get the sense that no one else who walked into the room could probably see her.

"Well, that would be usual people for you," she says. "Surpassingly predictable." She plants her elbows on the table, chin to fist, and _stares_ at you. Like you're the creepy numinous thing being shown to her. You're used to your eyes startling people, but you're not used to _that_.

"Do you live here?" you ask, in the hopes of dislodging her unnerving gaze.

"Do I live?" she asks back, and doesn't stop staring.

"...you're asking me. Why are you asking me that?"

"It's a valid question. You're the one who carries the answer. Even if you don't _know_ the answer," she amends. She slides a silver bookmark, starkly at contrast with the golden decor, from behind her ear and sets it between the pages of the book. You catch a few words before she shuts it. 

_Of flesh and death shall the Speaker be formed, first of the creeping things. In haste they shall gather His pieces, the one who consumes blood and the one who conceals it, all but one. So shall His Croak be cut short..._

This kind of morbid, abstruse stuff reminds you more of AA than anything else, and you prickle with unease. Still, this apparition's talk of an answer seems less finite at least than AA's words about endings... "All right, I'll bite. What does your life have to do with me?"

Her smile has an edge to it, and in the odd light of the room you catch a glimmer of violet from her eyes - it would remind you of seadwellers except that the cold whiteness of her sclera reminds you that she is not a troll at all. "That _is_ the question, isn't it?" And you're beginning to bare your teeth in exasperation when she goes on, finally, "- Well, I suppose in some fashion you unpicked the code that generated me, but the code didn't really generate _me_ precisely." Which doesn't surprise you: you can't remember code governing her existence. That doesn't mean anything, of course. "It generated a possibility reservoir. I, as I stand before you, would seem to be a projection or manifestation of that reservoir."

And you've just about managed to parse that when you realize she didn't even -

"That doesn't answer my question," you object, automatically rubbing at your forehead as if your head was starting to hurt – you don't think this is even the kind of dream you would feel a migraine in, but this is the kind of conversation that might give you one. "So you're saying there's a nonzero probability that you'll never exist at all, and I affect your chances? You don't seem very concerned about it all."

"No - I suppose that if I _did_ exist, I would probably experience some anguish over the possibility of not existing. But right now I know I don't exist, and it's hardly unpleasant." You don't think she said that from a place of knowing too much about your life. But you're not sure she didn't, and it makes you wince. "Which is not to say that the possibility of my existence isn't metaphysically compelling. It is both an indicator and a catalyst of the machinery of doom. Your hand - you're a technical type, right? - moves that machinery; you have, or will have, a manual override of sorts. But I know only a heap of broken images." She bites the edge of her fingernail, an oddly familiar gesture for such an alien apparition, and looks at you sideways again.

"You're being unnecessarily convoluted."

"No more so than the data structures you favor. Which is not a slight on your data structures. Their convolutions are, in the end, more necessary than they look."

"Okay, I'll concede that," you say, trying to get a conversational foothold in her endless riddles. She _does_ know you better than she has a right to, considering you just met her. Your mind teems with questions, fluttering bits of knowledge that never stop to settle into a coherent image. Finally you settle into an exasperated "...But are you here to tell me something or just feed me vague bits and pieces I probably won't understand until it's too late anyway? I thought Prospit was supposed to be a _friendly_ game construct, I can't wait to see the parts of this game that _aren't_ trying to help..." that you realize is unlikely to yield any useful results but really have trouble bringing yourself to care.

For such a flat-toothed creature, she manages quite an eerie grin. "Oh, you'll see them soon enough." And then she purses her lips, looking - a little chagrined, if anything, which is not what you expected - "You will, but they don't answer to me. I have a penchant for grandiosity, but I can't actually take the credit for your misfortune and that of your friends." And then her expression - freezes, for a moment, something genuinely uncomfortable in it, and her mouth hangs open like she wants to say something other than what she's saying, but she breezes on. "You know certain pieces of it already. You are not a Seer, but your vision twofold gives you an eye into another universe - just like it gives you Prospit and Derse. The white and the black chessmen at once."

Listening to her talk is maddening, it's like seeing into the clouds, where you recognize a vision and then don't remember what you recognized, every word seeming oddly familiar to you even though their meanings are opaque. "...chessmen? So aliens also have low-tech but infuriatingly complex ancient mindgames? I'm... actually regaining a bit of faith in the universe here. But what does that have to do with –" 

"Oh, yes, you aren't aware, are you? The game has always been present in your universe pursuant to **the Game** ; it's far from coincidence." You can somehow hear where her letters are capitalized and emphasized. "Chess is an artifact, as it were. You worked with the code; you know how ancient it is - or you can guess. Your world is seeded with the pieces of this, to teach your memory for when the time comes, which it has -"

But then you're not listening to her, because something else catches your attention.

_System.statusQuery:sensors &sector=241&status=idle_

You almost try to respond to it at first, as if it was a question directed to you. Then it answers itself. Figures and charts, gray around the edges – in the gauzy flatness of dream you process the information as if you'd never seen it before, never heard speech of this kind, a pidgin where mind speaking in language mixes with machine speaking in code and – as the input becomes more complex it takes _effort_ to parse it – ailerons and microdimensions – carbon scrubbing, day/night cycle –

Checks and small adjustments. Astris is in a dormant enough phase that it feels like you could just reach out and draw him closer.

But you thought you couldn't even _hear_ him here –

Straining to comprehend is dizzying, straining to listen, this should be easy, but bits of code are passing by completely undeciphered, as if – you were using a completely different part of your thinkpan to –

This place makes you vague, makes you lose track of information that would normally be clear. It's a difference of _wavelength_ \- not literally, but as distinct as different radio bands - you're just hearing him closer because of the connection between you, _otherwise nothing would differentiate his voice from the far-off millions_ -

and millions, and millions, and when you focus - you haven't been, it's just the end of the world - of course. 

You knew this would happen, it was a foregone conclusion from the rest of it; but you didn't expect to be stranded here, locked into half of yourself, no more able to evict yourself from this place and this body than you could evict one eye from your head. Unable to get from here to your own private dream-construct, unable to _reach_ him -

Unable to comfort -

\- when you're honest about it, unable to comfort yourself. He's going to die, and you're going to die twice somehow, and you don't remotely have your priorities straight and you know that. He's going to die, and he _wants_ to, and it's better that way even though it feels hollow - you thought knowing that would make it so much easier - you were wrong.

"This is serious," you say, standing up, dropping the book that you were flipping back and forth in your hands. "Stop going on about chess games and hoofbeastshit, I need to get out of here -"

"Okay," she says, too-calmly.

"What's that supposed to mean, I just _told_ you it wasn't okay - I need to - to -" You're not how to articulate why you need so badly to be away from this place and back where you can reach him. The words stick when you try.

"To endure doom and to bear witness to it," she says for you, overly incisive as always. "You are a Doom player and you have vision twofold. These are two different things, and they'll serve you two different ways. If they'll serve you at all, which is up for debate. But don't ignore the possibility."

"I don't know what you're _talking_ about and I'm sitting here in this library while my _friends_ are in danger and -" It catches at your throat, you've never told anyone about your ancestor and you're not about to start with a game apparition, it's an offense to your dignity - 

"And your body is sleeping," and by the way she looks at you she knows it's the wrong ending to the sentence. "Pretty soon it won't be. I would say 'lucky for you' but I think you and I have realistic expectations in common as a way of approaching the world."

He's still in idle, now that you've tuned in on that frequency, you know he hasn't even guessed it yet, and you can't decide whether that's reassuring or makes it worse - "Mother Grub on a skateboard, how do I get out of here?" 

"You can see from both sides of the board, with your vision twofold, but as a doom player, there's something else -"

"Will you stop making portentous noises and _help_ me -"

She goes on, undaunted. "- something else you can do. You can flip the chessboard. And to answer your question, Sollux Captor, the way you get out of here is by _waking up_."

You're just about to ask her how the fuck you're supposed to do that when suddenly you do, with the last disoriented-dreaming realization that you don't even know her name.

~~~

Waking.

There's a sickly-sweet taste in your mouth and an awful burgeoning sense of pressure in your head and you feel like hell even before you stagger to your feet and [open your eyes](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004052) -

[That](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004053) was a [mistake.](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004054)

There's a giant crater in your ceiling and you think you killed at least one neighbor - not that they're going to live anyway. You're pretty sure bicyclops dad is gone, too. It was destined, from the point where Karkat ran that virus, and you wish you'd had a chance to say goodbye. You know too many things and you don't like any of them. But some of them, you were at least prepared for.

Still crawling all over from the mind honey comedown – your skin feels ill-fitting, your thinkpan emptied and refilled with ostraca and dust – you hear the Psiioniic's voice at first even more muffled than in Prospit's dreamhaze, just a humming polyphonic patter of code layered over itself, blending to indistinguishable then resolving as your head throbs and eases –

The thin wondering thread that reaches whisper-quiet for you, foregrounded against a rumbling horizon of meteors soon to fall, casualties of skyfire and shockwaves - so hushed but so unmistakably _there_ that you almost feel you could speak to him here, in your hive awake, and he would hear you -

And you know that even if words can't cross the divide, he can sense you, and you think _thank you_ and _love_ , try to center your mind on the way you feel when Astris holds you, on what everything you've had with him is worth to you -

You could try to construct the dreamspace. You're drained to dregs from the involuntary expulsion of power, but you could, you think, just barely anchor it for him, you might have time before - 

Your husktop dings, not the normal message indicator but the sharp noise it makes when someone's flagged it urgent, and you glance at the screen.

CC: S)(ello, are you even T)(--ER-E?  
CC: You're supposed to be my server player, rig)(t? Everyt)(ing is going ronquil )(ere!  
CC: K---ELP!

\- and you know as surely as if it were prophecy that you won't be able to do everything in time. 

Still, you have redundancy; ever and always, you have redundancy, and even as you sit down and start figuring out her situation, part of you - part of you reaches out to Astris and clings, riffles through memories for images to hold, togetherness in the dreamspace and moments that were beyond words - shouts its pity and gratitude, and you don't think it's enough to drown out the sadness you don't want to inflict on him, but that doesn't stop you from hoping.

And responding emotion ripples in echo through you, from outstretched concern as the unbearable light from your eyes dies away to alarm when you focus so intently on him to – to understanding, to reaching back.

Deep pride and deeper faith and longing to comfort, longing to hold, that crystallizes into – not touch but feeling evoked by touch, associations and responses, the enfolding soothe of hands on your horns - the simple content closeness of arms around your shoulders; the heavy wondering promise of joined hands – listening to him as deeply as you can, while you set to solving FF's problem.

You have an advantage as a server player: you know the code and the commands, and bringing Feferi through the paces and setting up the game apparatus is none too difficult. But she grows increasingly distraught.

TA: ye2, there ii2 a meteor headed iin your diirectiion, but iim workiing wiithiin parameter2.  
TA: 2iit tiight and iill have you pulled out of there iin two tiick2.  
CC: Okay, I'm putting t)(is t)(ing in t)(e totem wave.  
CC: But it's getting )(arder to breat)(e! I can deal wit)( it for a w)(ale, but I'm nervous.  
CC: And my lusus is acting un)(appy...

Of course. The falling meteors would heat the ocean. 

You work faster. KK is playing with the memo feature in Trollian, and you're checking in with him periodically, trying to sound casual. There are more voices now, but they're further away; many of the nearby ones have gone silent already.

Karkat is deploying crap around your hive now. Or what's left of your hive. The ceiling is gone, which is, all in all, rather helpful when it comes to making room for tall unwieldy game apparatus. The damage to the mainframe is - you're chagrined when you glance at it, but you can't afford to care whether it's recoverable or not. The world is ending and you're going to die.

In some ways this is your doing; you unlocked the ancient code - in other ways, it was always destined to happen, and you're not sure whether to take pride in being an instrument of destiny or to resent it. 

You can't hear yourself in the chorus of the doomed, though the words of the prophecy ring keenly in your ears as you work; as with each second that ticks by you become more certain that there won't be enough of them – you never hear yourself, maybe because you're listening so hard instead for him, who sounds so much like you – but you know when he hears you.

When you know sudden, fanatic, unreasoning certainty that _this is not the end_ – faith in the prophecy greater than you ever had yourself – that to die twice is once to live again – emanating from Astris but in some way closer than the scattered panicked fragments of your mind that aren't absorbed in him or in the game – 

You know the depths of him struggling to press some alien emotion into you, shredding at his mind to tear its remnants free, to envision through profound obscurity what it would be – _to rail against death, to scrape and rend up from its depths, to grasp and ascend into light._ He's clawing gouges into the structure of his thinkpan to show you what he wants for you, longs for you to have, that he could never – with all the press and force of _please, please, do this for me_ –

(Even as you feel the ebb of his attention, the switch clicking over with some weighty order given, the empty ache as pieces of him are forced away from you and thrown into complying –) He's trying to mute his gratitude as you quell your grief, but still you know – it's tangled up in _I love you_ , inseparable from pity that rolls from him like light. 

And as your mind fills with ponderous effort, with spinning-up and oceanic power – even then, part of him speaks to you one final time visual-vivid of hands and reaching, of finding and pulling each other into dream together – and with a howl of engines he tells the ship _home_ , and dives.

Something is wrong. You can't think straight. At first you think it's a consequence of the close attention you're paying to Astris, the effort and exertion and then sudden exhilaration - the knowing, the terrible grateful awareness that this will be his final jump - he can hear you still, then he can't, then it's all-consuming, as he burns through white-hot with pain and winks out like a flare and -

\- something is _still_ wrong. When you brush your fingers to your face to swab away the blurring tears your hand comes away bloody. You can't think straight. You can't think. Where your thoughts should be there's something else, a synaesthetic soundfeeling that hurts, that rips away layers of you. It happens quickly. _I hope I got it right_ is the last thing you remember, thinking of Feferi, thinking of - 

Then language goes, then movement, then sight. 

~~~

Drifting again. 

Drifting.

Waking into - fragmented sensations, sharp, metallic, your blood in your mouth - sense-memory of cool leathery lips, sudden vivid startling invasive -

\- _not_ memory but reality - you shout, preemptive, bitter, wordless, it boils out of your throat and rings through purple streets - as you think, _No, not again, not after everything_ -

\- and then you realize that was not a thought but the _anticipation_ of a thought, whatever the hell that means. Memory and phantom, death and life overlapping, you are awaited, you are _called_. It tugs at you.

Something else is trying to nudge you, order you around. An intrusive [voice](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004406). It's not like Vriska, but it still makes you hells of uncomfortable and you push outward and crackle with force until it leaves and this place is silent again and you can figure out what you are.

You're - the half of you that was missing on Prospit. And you've died, and something insistent tugs on you like gravitation, calls you to the scene of your death. 

And you fly, once more, on numinous winds until you're hovering there. Staring down at your own corpse and at a sea-dweller girl, tyrian-blood tears leaking down the inside of her nose behind her goggles, fragile and flustered and desperate. Your own blood stains her lips, dried to golden-dark. "You're okay, you're okay, you're alive-" Feferi's saying, her fins fluttering with excitement. She is jeweled and porcelain-perfect and wild-eyed and so small, everything and nothing like _her_.

Groggy and waking, you had thought the quiet in your thinkpan was a feature of Derse where you woke from your death - only a babble of indistinct murmurs in the background. 

Now in what remains of your hive everything is _still_ strangely hushed, not only the voices of the doomed but the one you can't stop expecting to hear, finally silent with the rest of them - He's gone from your head, he's _gone_ , and you feel like crying but instead you start laughing and you can't stop, giddy with stupid relief, lonelier than you've ever been.


	2. the Fire Sermon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is Feferi Peixes. She scares the living shit out of you, through no fault of her own. Sometimes you just catch a glimpse of her in the periphery, or the flowery-salty scent of her walking past and you jolt all over with memories that don’t belong to you and don’t attach to her, not really - and you're drawn to that. 
> 
> But at the same time she doesn’t want to hurt you - no - she doesn’t want to _harm_ you. And she is also nothing like either of the people you’re so desperately missing.
> 
> (Warning for self-shaming/self-directed ableism. Oh, Sollux.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _To Carthage then I came_  
>  _Burning burning burning burning_  
>  \--T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

Fade in: the Land of Brains and Fire.

You feel the two halves of yourself awake and present, doesn't matter that your Prospit self still lingers in a now-empty library; your mind busily re-iterates the code that makes it possible that you are here and whole again somehow. It feels like your body is firming up as you stand. Here, and whole, and terribly, terribly lost.

"Hey. FF. Hey, shoosh, you're -" You land next to the Tyrian girl, touch her arm. There are what look like brains hovering in the air, and she's skewered a couple of them through, but when you move closer the others dart back to a safe distance.

You're still not sure what the hell just happened, but you're piecing it together in your mind as Feferi looks up at you with yellow blood on her lips and takes a deep breath and her face resolves to a self-consciously brave smile. She says your name, pronounces it like Sole-lux; you're not sure whether it's her accent or a fish pun. "I'm shore-ry, I didn't realize Mom was going to die from the heating of the water - or that she'd release the Vast Glub when she did - I raced right here as soon as -"

"I didn't know either, but I knew I was going to die, so -" You shrug. It's not a big deal to you now. Looking at your own corpse at your feet is a little bit unnerving, but it's almost more sad because Aradia would have been so curious and interested in it and it makes you miss her. "You got here, you... brought me back, whatever, it's cool now -"

"I -" she says, and she's about to continue when a pair of imps appear in the doorway and she shrieks, shrill and startled, like she's going to jump up on a chair like a brownblood from a cartoon - but at the same time throws herself past you in a leap and impales them, both at once. The monsters pixellate and release chunks of grist all over the ground. Then she looks back at you, triumphant and - somehow expectant, like for some unforeseen reason she's hungry for your approval, and you give a low whistle. 

"You've got pretty sick aim," you tell her.

"Well? Don't just stand there, we've got a lot more of these to wade through!" But the way she says it isn't accusatory, just - wonderfully energetic, and the way she pinions you with her eyes makes you want to protest and give in all at once and you kiss her without thinking and pull away tasting your own blood and feeling startled and confused and appalled with yourself as she laughs gently - 

Fortunately, she's right. There's a hell of a lot to be done.

In between tearing down waves of imps assaulting the staircase of what used to be your hivestem, she squeezes your hand breathless and _excited_. You would have expected the battle-frenzy of the highest of highbloods to be huge and intimidating, but she's small and fizzy, and it's not her fault that she scares you for the wrong reasons, and not her fault that every time you look at her and start to get pulled along into her bubble of positive attitude something stops you because you feel hollow inside.

"Feferi," you say, and you want to be gentle and let her down easy, but she frowns, she's too bright-eyed incisive behind her goggles, not _upset_ but concerned -

"You haven't called me that once yet. You're about to say something sea-rious - am I right?"

"Yes... Look, I can see the pity in your eyes when you look at me and I just... I'm really not the best potential quadrantmate for you. I'm kind of fucked up at the best of times, and now isn't the best of times." She already knows rumor enough about you and Aradia, but you've got to let her know the extent to which your emotions are a wrecking zone - "I - I had a matesprit before, and our relationship was a secret, and now he's dead, with the rest of Alternia -" Your voice only quavers a little bit and you can’t bear to say why you’re at least as much happy as sad.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, gently.

“I actually probably don’t want to talk about it.” You managed to make that not sound curt, at least, just honest. You look off into the distance. Is that another imp approaching? No, it’s a phosphene, an afterimage from the amount of power you’ve been running mowing them down. You sigh and sit up against the stairwell wall, legs wide and arms propped against them, tired and blinking,

“Tell me something, then, Sole-lux,” she says and - she’s just so _friendly_ , genuinely extroverted like no one else you know, it’s hard not to smile looking back at her when she eyes you like that. “Are you telling me this because _you’d_ rather I left you alone? Or because you’re scared to disappoint me?”

And she just keeps surprising you.

“...it’s definitely the second one of those things," you manage.

“Is it the first one at all too?” she asks, and you think about kissing her, earlier when you were frightened out of your wits and mad with relief and reacting to the end of the world, and - you startled yourself, but that's not her fault either.

And you reach up - she’s facing you, squatting down, her head a little above yours - and you put your arms around her because it makes more sense to answer that way. “I would rather you didn’t leave me alone, FF.”

"Good! Because I don't want to leave you alone," she says. "I would if you asked, but I pike you." She rocks on her feet and squeals and giggles and falls over, catching herself on the wall next to you and curling into your arm.

“Augh! Sorry!"

“Silly landdweller movement styles! How does that even work?”

~~~

So this is Feferi Peixes.

She scares the living shit out of you, through no fault of her own. Sometimes you just catch a glimpse of her in the periphery, or the flowery-salty scent of her walking past and you jolt all over with memories that don’t belong to you and don’t attach to her, not really ( _but they are yours to hold now_ , you remind yourself, _there is no one else to bear witness._ )

She is inherently a frightening thing and you're drawn to that. But at the same time she doesn’t want to hurt you - no - she doesn’t want to _harm_ you. 

And she is also nothing like either of the people you’re so desperately missing.

Half the time you feel as much pale as flushed for her, and she reciprocates there, too; and that feels like cheating. It makes it less guilty to know that Aradia wouldn’t blame you at all, but that also makes it worse somehow. The part of you seeking annihilation, the part of you that wants to fling itself on something more sharp and solid than any part of you and just cease to exist - 

\- it's _safe_ with FF, even though she _is_ that sharp and solid thing; she guards you where you fail to guard yourself. Or, more accurately, she guards her own capacities, so well that you're not even certain what they are, so well that you know it's the practiced habit of a lifetime.

Another new experience is the realization that you're doing as much to calm Feferi's passions as she is yours - just so subtly and simply that it only hits you later. 

One night she walks up and hands you a hairbrush. "I need you to trawl through and get the knots out," she says, "can you do that for me?" And you do, and the whole time she tells you about something Vriska said to her - that _beach!_ \- and the problem she's having with the alchemiter, and then you're halfway through her hair and the tension's melted out of her and you're not even sure what you _did_. For a lowblood, you’re incredibly high-strung, so you were usually on the other side of that dynamic with AA and it’s weird realizing that it’s actually relaxing in its own way to calm Fef down; that somewhere in amongst the motions of your hands to pat and soothe her, the world goes into soft focus. 

The empty spaces in you aren't shaped like her, but somehow around her, they feel less hollow.

~~~

The grass in the Land of Dew and Glass brushes at your chin and shoulders when you finally clear enough imps from the hillside to sit and eat. Feferi alchemized something like wingbeast meat but lighter and less tough and salty-sweet and you're first too involved in savoring it to speak at all, then too worn out from strifing to say anything that means much. You talk about your hives and your wrigglerhoods and Feferi glances at you over delicate needle-fanged bites, holding her hair out of the way; captchalogues the bones, a little furrow between her brows behind the glasses. 

You doze off there for a moment, sprawled in the greenery, and snap into waking - only realizing after she lays a hand gently on your shoulder and peers at you with a look of concern that it was her leaning over you that woke you; that you must have jolted visibly - you don't remember what you might have dreamed.

“When I first met you," she says, staring concerned and intent, "I thought _people_ startled you and I thought, oh, that’s normal for a computer hacker, you don’t sea many people - but it’s not that, is it? _I_ startle you.” She leans closer, and her hair brackets you, heavy-ticklish and smelling of the oils she uses to keep it moist - you rubbed them in for her, the last time - and your heart rate goes up, for more than one reason, as if to make her point for her. “Did I push you into this too fast? I’m sorry - I can be kind of intense, I mean, I thought it was o-cray but maybe -”

“Shit,” you say, “no, don’t blame yourself, I have - I have weird stuff in my head, and no business taking it out on you -” But you're still – not flinching away from her, but darting your eyes, glancing self-recriminating, self-conscious at the ground – holding your body very still, and she picks up on it, of course she does, she _notices_ people, really watches, and –

“But it’s weird stuff that has to do with _me_ and not with the other trolls.”

“No, it’s _not_.” You surprise yourself with how emphatic you sound. “It really, really isn’t you.”

“Wow, you’re really angry about somefin! But I can tell you’re not angry _at_ me, so thanks for that reashoreance at least. So. Let’s sea...” She plunks herself down in your lap, mischievous, casual, turns round and leans her head back on your shoulder. “...you have weird stuff in your head, and it makes you angry at someone who’s not me. And jumpy at me. Hmmmmm.” Then, suddenly, she freezes. “Sollux, am I doomed to die?”

“No! Not as far as I can tell, I mean! Goddamnit, now I’ve scared you for stupid reasons.” You're grimacing, fidgeting your fingers against each other, bogged down in barely knowing what to say, let alone how –

“Do it another fifteen or twenty times and we’ll be efin,” she says calmly, and you realize she’s been noticing you startle for quite a while. “It has something to do with the voices, though. Am I right?”

“Yes... sort of,” and you grope for words, not sure where to put this or how to talk about, and then it occurs to you: Feferi’s a highblood. Pretty much all the ones you’ve met believe in ancestors, bona-fide serious believe in ancestors, and the tyrian lineage is its own weird rarefied thing. You’re at least not going to run up against a patronizing attitude. “I... had these visions, back before the world ended. Not the generalized omen-and-portent kind of visions. Dreams. But true dreams." You're not sure how much you want to tell her. Everything seems either hyperreal or unreal right now. A long moment passes and you steady yourself and she takes a breath to speak before you manage to continue - "About my ancestor." 

"Go on, I'm listening," she says. 

"I would... see things from his head, things that happened to him... sometimes see through his eyes. He - he was enslaved by someone who looked a lot like you. But what I meant when I said it isn't you - it _isn't_ , she was - horrible, and mad, and not in a small way, _frightening_ \- I, I guess I have daymares about her," you say because it's easier than explaining - "Am I making any damn sense?"

Her eyes are wide and curious, and thoughtful like she's assembling something in her head, and you don't know if it's - anything like the truth, and it's always so hard to speak of things for the first time - "It's not surprising an ancestor of mine would be... like that," she says, and grimaces a little. "I wanted to change all that, but - in the history I've been schoolfed, the strength of the Alternian empire has always been its capacity for terror. And the royal line at the heart of it." She blinks, long-lashed and sad, and you wonder how much of that sadness is about the end of the world and how much pre-dates it. Then her eyes return from that pensive distance, and she's looking at you again. "Do you _want_ to talk about what happened to your ancestor?"

You have to think about it, you were expecting her to push you - _keep_ expecting her to push you, because she's strong and knows what she wants, and you're used to that from AA; but FF is different, water and wind instead of fire and force, slow currents underneath quick ripples. You do want to talk about Astris and you don't. If she could only know without your telling her; if you weren't suddenly aware of the tightness in your throat and the feeling that you're walking on a too-thin wall over a too-deep pit - "Maybe," you settle for saying. "I'm not sure."

~~~

After that it's a little better; you feel a little lighter, less trapped, and when thoughts rise to your mind you can let them out, mention things in passing. That you spoke with him in dreams. That he helmed a starship. She doesn't pry, just takes it in, and you don't even know how to begin explaining what Astris meant to you, but you think that you could explain to her, if you could to anyone.

You keep traveling; imps growing stronger and stranger as you go. You're reasonably certain you saw something in the game code as you reconstructed it about the attainment of in-game powers, but that was tied to a particularly nasty ~ATH loop and anyway your psionics combined with her eerie tyrian resilience seem to be doing fine. Or at least a given value of fine for a bizarre quest after death and the apocalypse, until Feferi's seadweller ex-moirail shows up with a chip on his shoulder and brandishing what he claims in a weird wavy stutter is a "w-weapon of legend" in your face.

[Fighting him off](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004478) is hardly the way you'd planned to spend your evening. 

~~~

All this time you've been ranting at Karkat about how the Land of Brains and Fire is this big joke making fun of you and right now it actually seems funny in a horrible way; your brain feels like it's lit on fire. Defending against physical projectiles is one thing - trying to keep an energy pulse weapon from harming you is an entirely different matter, and you're in better practice than you've ever been in your life so this isn't a migraine, thank god, because it would be a fucking terrible one if it went that way, and you don't feel quite like you're manic the _normal_ way, ha ha, but you’re vibrating with tension like you had energy grubs for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and you _didn’t_ but you can’t remember when you ate a normal meal either. Your skin feels hot all over, scorched with the backwash of energy; does that little choad even know he would have incinerated you if you weren’t - ugh, this is stupid and your clothes hurt and -

\- you’ve been saying all of this out loud to Feferi without even realizing it, as she hauls you toward the ablution trap, and you're still ranting. “What did he even _want_? - was this about you, because if it was he should have just _talked_ to you, this is not even just hoofbeastshit, this is like - fucking horrorterror shit, the stankiest loaf of horrorterrorshit I have ever wasted my psionics on -” and she’s shooshing you and hauling the scorched remains of your T-shirt off and your skin is unbroken but inflamed a surreal shade of yellow all over. When the fabric slides against your skin you hiss out “Fuck!” and she goes slower - 

Everything greys out for just a little while, you’re conscious of time passing but you’re not talking any more, everything moves in fits and skips and the tiniest movement of the cloth grates like she’s rubbing sand against your skin and you catch your hands trembling, your eyes closing, even though you’ve been through so much worse. You only half-hear, dull and floating, her popping the cap on a bottle of something as she strokes your hair soft and distracting, but the sting of the alchemized antiseptic is enough to jolt you out of your exhausted half-trance, still too dazed to say a word. It’s like she’s touching the unskinned cords of your muscles, now, like the stuff on her fingers is being rubbed raw onto exposed nerve-endings and you bite down on your lower lip and you recognize this, somehow, in some pocket at the back of your thinkpan that you’ve had no reason to mind in a long time. It’s - the directness of it and - she starts in on a sensitive spot near a grubscar and you leave off biting and inhale hard - and her scent, and there’s something - skin-searing and the tang of the sea - there’s some familiarity, in the way this hurts, and it’s turning you on so badly that you’re already half-unsheathed in your pants.

She stops when you whimper out loud and you’re only just aware that you did because it startled her into stopping, and your head whips around to look at her - the outlines of her horns, _sudden animal fear_ and then you see her eyes and it’s the _(right/wrong)_ look in them and everything is so silent and calm and safe. “Oh! I’m sorry, Sollux - I’ll -”

"Nodon’tstop,” you stammer out rapidly, breathing hard through your nose between words. Your face is burn-hot and your cheeks pull strangely when you speak and you’re grateful for how the light-scalded skin hides the blush of shame that’s written through you indelibly. “I need you to do this -" _until I can't think anymore about how sick I am for wanting it, shot through with the horror of borrowed memory that becomes something beautiful because it's a piece I have left_ \- and you’re watching her face for an answer, there’s a moment of confusion and then she looks at you with narrowed brows and wide eyes.

She knows you like some roughness when pailing, the feel of her claws in your back, the bite of her fangs, and she finally says “ _Oh!_ I be-reef I understand -” And she smiles with gentle mischief - you can’t get over the way she is sometimes, there’s something palpably indomitable about her presence and at the same time she _shows_ you that she’s feeling genuinely timid. Part of you says that’s not what you need right now and part of you requires exactly that, to be able to trust, to let her take you _through_ this. 

Still eyeing you straight-on, she goes for the button on your jeans, and you don’t know how to quadrant the look on her face, it’s at the same time steady pale caretaking and fever-bright flushed curiosity - and if the T-shirt was like sand the jeans are sandpaper on your hips. Feferi nudges your collarbone with the heel of her hand and you slump against the porcelain and gasp with the sudden shock of cold on your back and arch up, a little, and she works your pants down from your waist.

Her claws scrape against your thighs on the way down, just lightly, a graze you wouldn’t even have noticed if you weren’t hypersensitive and burning all over, enough that you could almost wonder if she did it by accident except for the way she looks at you, questioning, reading the way you hiss and try not to squirm. You don’t want to have to talk, are afraid you’ll have to ask her to come up and do it again after she forces your jeans over your cramping feet - half of you just wants to have this done _to_ you, the other half just doesn’t want to look at the urge hard enough to form words, _Dig them deeper, I need_ \- but she’s seen what she needed to see and when she straddles you to pull your underwear off, leans over you silhouetted against the ceiling light and kisses your stomach, you’re anticipating - fearing your reaction - getting a twinging half-buried thrill from wanting the bite that comes slow and careful and tearing-deep. 

You stare up at your ruined ceiling unseeing, each of her perfect highblood-whetted teeth a tiny monument of pain but - no - you _do_ see, the fading-white afterimage of her against the cracks and waterstains - the coilings - the extravagant riot of her hair - and the shame is like a choking liquid in your throat that you can barely breathe through and you blink your eyes disoriented, shaking off the image; you need - you need the dial turned up on this, you need it - “Go faster. Please -” - to drown out the babble of thoughts and images reminding you _why_ , and she lifts her head and looks at you questioningly again and you writhe against her, exulting in the way the movement scrapes and burns along your skin, the pinpricks of hot-cold pain where her teeth went in and the trickle of blood. She reaches up then, fingers against sunburnt grubscars and you ask only by squeezing your eyes shut hard before she digs in and for a moment there’s only an array of sensations like weights pinning you to the tub. A moment, and then it’s complicated again, a jumble of mental noise like crackling radio signals, but your bulge is primed and thick and squirming with need.

She scrapes claws over your oversensitized stomach and hits the spot where the bite mark is and it hurts and it’s _sweet,_ then it's a vertiginous tipping point and as her claws catch at still-bleeding skin you shove it all back, practiced, automatic, cram it into a corner of your thinkpan and there’s _nothing_ and you’re _terrified._ Her claws scratch closer to your bulge - dig into your inner thigh - and you can’t feel any of it, the all-over smarting of your skin, the cold of the ablution trap, your bulges writhing against each other - you needed it, were just sinking into it, and now you think you might -

Feferi says something that you can’t hear over the thoughts - borrowed images - memories that are rushing in to fill the numbness, without pain to drown them to perfect silence, and you slam your head back against the ceramic and come back begging into the hard brightness of the moment, her hand on your bulges squeezing too hard, perfect, the cracking white net of pain centered just there, the back of your skull, where - _no_ -

\- hands on the sides of your head, holding you still. Face pressed close to yours and shouting and her cold breath on your cheek is a piece of something that’s broken and you can’t put it together and - “Sollux!” and she’s touching your head with her hands, suddenly too gentle and eyes wide with alarm and so very definitely Feferi, so very definitely your friend, small and scared even as she holds you in place with strong highblood hands and she’s staring at you shocked and saying, “What did you mean by that? To let go and let you take it?” and then the question you feel coming a moment before it hits, hits like a slap for all she’s not angry. “Who were you _saying_ that to? You - you mumbled somefin about a needle -”

You feel dirty and sad and small, want to collapse in on yourself with disgust. You want to close your eyes but it won't help you hide from her or from yourself. "Never mind, okay, I'm a pretty fucked-up troll, I shouldn't have dragged you into this, just leave it."

Her eyes widen further, amber and dark pupils and she says, "This is about your daymares, isn't it." 

"Yeah," and for a moment you think she's going to drop the subject there and you should feel relieved. Instead you're just bright with dread - shoved up into proximity with things you weren't looking at, scared she'll ask more and scared she won't. 

But she circles back around, undeterred, laces her fingers tightly around your horns; it’s inherently soothing but it also says she’s not letting you off the hook.

“What did you mean by _let me_?” she asks again, quietly and deliberately.

There’s no way around this, at least not completely: you wouldn’t lie to FF outright and more than likely couldn’t if you tried, not with her silvery quick-darting eyes on your face, not when she’s pulled herself this close to putting your two and two together. 

“I used to - do this sometimes,” you say, fully aware that you haven’t defined _this_ and that your lisp gets thicker when you’re nervous, “I - for my ancestor - he was always in so much pain and I, uh, I figured out how to - to take it from him for a while,” and you lick your lips and swallow against a dry throat, hearing every little sound of your mouth moving, feeling every rustling movement of air - “He never wanted to let me,” you add, miserably, because you hadn’t actually answered her question yet, and as soon as the words are out your mouth you know you’ve said too much.

You turn away and shut your eyes, half because you can’t face the gentleness of her reproach and half because you’re going to cry if you’re not careful and you’re aware that if you do, she’ll turn this into soothing you, into a feelings jam - or maybe she won’t, maybe she’ll be too angry, and either possibility is just _bad_ , so you swallow it back and breathe and she says, “Look at me. It’s _o-cray_ , but look at me.” 

Her voice is not steel; it’s willow and kelp and all the things that grow and encircle and bend but never break, and you can’t escape it, and you snap your eyes open, holding your breath.

“Don’t _do_ that! You’re looking at me like I’m going to hit you.” And you let it out in a shaky laugh, but she’s not _done_ , not staring at you any less hard. “This - the thing you told me about wasn’t just dreams.”

“No,” you say softly, “it wasn’t.”

“You pitied him,” she says faintly, and then an indescribable expression breaks over her face and she says, " _Oh my cod_. He - it wasn't - you didn't mean a ghost or a vision from the distant past, an apparition out of ancient history, you meant - he was alive, when the world ended." And you nod at her, just a slight dip of your head - not certain what she's trying to get at, until she leans back against the wall of the ablution trap and says in a stunned whisper - "The Empress's Helmsman."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you _tail_ me?" Feferi's voice rises, sharp, a little frantic, and you flinch back and hide your face again, and then she leans in and cups your face in her hand, careful, delicate - "I'm not - I can be angry later," she says firmly, "but this is _important_ , and - I knew the story, that she kept a powerful yellowblood, but I would never have thought to put it together with _you_ -"

"Because -" You pause for a moment, trying to put the thought together. "I'm always having to tell people ridiculously fucking impossible things - and half the time they don't believe me - and so I, I only bother when it's a survival matter usually, I don't want to _waste_ my credibility on - a wild tale that could just be my thinkpan going on holiday, as far as anyone else is concerned -"

"But it's _not_ ," she says. "You see true things, efin if they sound impossible -"

"But I'm also _crazy_ ," and it comes out whiny and you're shivering, hot and cold at the same time, awkward and miserable. "I'm not always reliable. I -"

And she shifts closer and wraps her arms around your head tightly, pressing firmly in a way that gets past the initial sting of skin contact, hanging onto your horns with her fingers and holding you to her chest. "You _know_ you're not always reliable, Sollux. You know to doubt - but you doubt too much, and when you _are_ shore of something, I'll bereef you. Promise. Just don't hide important stuff! You _scared_ me!"

"I'm sorry," you murmur. You lean in against her cool skin, and a purr starts up in your chest, and - it feels strange, like you could cry, but the tears aren't coming; but you're beginning to trust in a way that goes beyond just this - "I'm - I'm sorry, I fucked it up."

"No, no, stop that, yes, that was a terrible attempt at pailing but you can do betta than that." She strokes your hair, claws raking lightly against your scalp. "If you still want to."

Held like this, physically assured that she isn't going away, you can just barely start to unlock around your embarrassment and tell her "Yes, yeah, please -"

“What I was doing wasn’t working for you, though,” she says, pensive. “You freaked out. Tell me what _happened_ when you freaked out. I scratched you and you just -”

“- yeah, I kind of became drastically estranged from the handle there. Fuck. Sorry.”

“No, stop apologizing, shelly! I need you to explain, because I don’t want to mess you up like that.”

“I... I shut it down too hard, it was sudden and that wasn’t good, I...” You’re having trouble making the words come out your mouth; you feel a little dizzy and realize you’re breathing shallowly, and she strokes your horns and waits patiently for you to finish. The story you’re telling is too intimate to tell, somehow, you don’t feel like you have the _right_ , but the universe as you knew it is over and all any of you can do is make the rules up as you go along. Even knowing that, your voice feels sticky and leaden - “Usually I would... lock it down, the pain, when we... and I’d still feel it, in the back of my mind, just... oddly nonspecific, I guess, just all over, and - that became an experience I miss, somehow,” and the words tumble out of your mouth rapidly at the end as if you’d shaken your thinkpan to empty them out, still not fast enough to keep you from cringing and blushing as you say it.

“That still didn’t answer my question. Or rather... that tells me a _lot_ of fins, but not what made you flip out.” Feferi's stare is almost sharp enough to make you close back down, except that it's not _accusatory_ , not jealous; and you remember telling her that you had a matesprit before, and that she could have turned away then - 

“I... I guess I was startled, I did it automatically and - there wasn’t enough sensation to leak through, everything went dead and blank. Like accidentally tuning the volume too low on your media viewer. Except with my body, which was _stupid_.” 

“Okay,” she says, “really that’s enough wincing at your shell-f, I think we can... before that it was good, right? And I’m already getting the idea that I need to go slow, even if you were telling me to go faster. Wait. Why were you telling me to go faster?”

“It wasn’t _enough_ ,” you say, and you’re sure that your ears are even brighter yellow than they were, because the words come out in a kind of wretched plea - “I just needed - everything - all over -”

"All right," she says, "all right, tell me how you want to feel," and you're lost and stammering but she's so very patient and eventually you do.

~~~

You aren’t - haven’t been - aware of how all-over sharp she can be until she starts touching her way back down you, slowly, earfins scraping at the underside of your chin when she kisses your neck - her necklaces digging hard into the tingling-hot skin of your chest, leaving arcs of dotted white like the marks of blunted teeth - sparks of rebuilding pain so incidental that you’d overlook them if she didn’t know exactly what she was doing, easing you back into this. The antiseptic bottle rolls cool against a mark on your hipbone for a bizarre soothing moment as she hisses in between her teeth, a sound that’s half a shoosh and half the sharp breath of absolute concentration and there’s a loop of her hair fisted in one of your hands, cool and coiled-smooth and keeping your claws from digging into your palm.

You’re coping, in some half-instinctive way, by trying to keep each touch separate in your head, as she pours the scalding ointment again and kneads at the coiled-tight muscle on top of your thigh - the caustic healing surface burn; the way her fingers knead into tight flesh that spasms and aches and won’t relax; the slow burning warmth of almost wanting her claws, now, that she’s being so excruciatingly careful not to use them. The ebb as you think you’re getting used to this; the razor-bright spring tide of pain when she reaches the soft underside of a knee and the burn goes to a sear and her fingers pinch hard and expert into a tendon, the whole-body twitch that you can’t help and the smoldering nerve-endings that the movement reawakens, writhing against the floor of the ablution trap in search of a scraping, a digging in that smooth porcelain can’t provide. The sense-memory of the light-weapon’s glare direct on your skin broadsides you, transmutes into something it wasn’t nearly during the battle, and you want - you want _that_ again, want the ceiling to open up and pour down noon-harsh light just for those frantic moments between exposure and harm, for bones like hot coals and skin vibrated down to flush and flame. You aren’t even sure that the scorch of the gunfire hit there but still she’s rubbing liquid pain over the soles of your feet, scraping up the drips of it with her claws, heels to toes, and that’s it, you’re groaning out loud with it something wordless and sounding in your own ears nothing like pain.

You almost can’t tell when she starts using her claws finally, because they’re so sharp and she’s so slow and meticulous that you barely feel when they go in, right now with your skin lit up hot and thin and abused every touch feels like that, but _afterward_ the hard stinging stays, and you breathe through it - you realize she’s working her way up the sides of your legs, symmetrically, tracing tiny surface cuts into your skin and each one burns anew with the antiseptic rubbed all over you - somewhere your breathing turns into moaning, quiet, rhythmic, uncontrollable, and they don’t _fade_ , you can’t even feel any blood trickling out, she hasn’t scratched very deep but it’s like she’s setting signal fires, twin rows of them along your body - up past the knees now and she slashes longer marks into your thighs and your legs are entirely aflame. You can’t hold anything separate now and they blur together and it’s magnificent and still you need more.

You’re suspended, you’re cold all over, despite the burns, except for the scratches threaded down your legs, you need more and there’s a chill sticky sheen of worry over the pain that she won’t do it, that she’ll plateau you here and you won’t - you can’t _name_ it, can’t put it into words that mean places on your body or things she can say, can’t say _wring me out until I start to rip_ and expect that to mean anything except in your own malformed twisted-backward ‘pan, you’re whining and tugging at her hair and your bulges are twisting slick against your own stinging-taut skin and it’s not _enough._

She leans in over your shoulder and it should be completely incongruous that she shooshes you but somehow it isn’t. She works the tiny scratches into your hips, now, up along the sides of your stomach, even slower and more careful as she reaches more sensitive skin, and you want - you want to move, to thrash and pull and grab at her but you also desperately don’t want to risk interrupting what she’s doing - up toward the ribs, now, and you don’t even notice that your feet are starting to forget the all-over stinging until she slides her skirt off and there’s a pause. You let out a ridiculous whimpering noise when she stops touching you - and then there's a _clink_ as she unhinges the little cuff anklets and you don’t know why but then she drags her ankles along the tops of your feet and it’s this entirely new sensation, she’s never taken them off with you before and her skin there is scraping grit and tiny daggers and it wakes everything up again. She runs some water into the trap, lukewarm in a way that would be soothing except that it's like hot metal against the inflamed skin of your back.

Your whimpering deepens into a startled pain-laced moan and you rub your abused skin wanton against hers, catching and sticking and feeling like the whole surface of it could shred and crumple against her, tissue-paper-delicate, crush and smear over with bruises until you’re nerves all over and she could touch you anywhere, now, and it would go to straight to your spine as intense, as trembling hot as a hand on your bulge and you think she knows it. 

The claws go higher - slower - drawing it out and gradual and oh, you can feel each _cell_ as her claws part skin, bit by bit by luxuriant ripped inch and she doesn't even know it but the time she's giving you over the most sensitive places, just up by your grubscars and underneath your ribs, is time to think too hard about it, until bright new hurt layers over itself layers over old ache, going to stereophonic-resonant shivering all over. 

Between you reaching for her and arcing up and mewling loud for it at the back of your throat you finally, finally get her bulges wrapped around and between yours and you know her body well enough by now to feel that she’s just as into this as you are. Somehow that goes straight the base of your spine even more than the sensation does, that she’s fully unsheathed and the tendrils twine and twist, press and squeeze and weeping-cold and in every direction at once, each thin curling frond sliding against you on its own, the colliding and the crossing-over and the tips of your bulge caught between the flat sensitive tips of hers and you can never help falling back into this overwhelmed and curling your fingers around the both of you and trying at once to contain the slick chaotic all-over touch and press more of it against you. Affirmations come gasping from your throat lisped to the point of slurring, and you twine your legs around and between hers, contact and bright startled coolness like immersion in cold water, exhausted muscles in your back cramping and straining as you cant your hips up squirming and shameless. 

She pauses again, twists up, and unclasps the bracelets from her wrists-- the sound, itself, goes through you in a spike of wanting, because you know what it _means_ now and you’re already all-over cold burning, your skin is barely real and you thought this would be about losing yourself but she makes sure you keep yourself there, the whole time, staring into your eyes as she scrapes one wrist sandpaper-hard against the back of your neck, up beneath your ear and the burn here is hardly bearable as it is, where your bare skin caught the full force of the light. You hold your breath and clench your hand around your joined bulges as her shark-rough skin drags over your jawline and up your cheek, her fingers soothing through your hair as her wrist blazes marks that you know will last, a thick yellowed scraped-away swath, her hand holding and hurting all at once and you hang in the balance of it, dug-into clawed-bare open, every movement of her smooth-rough skin and her tendrils and her _breath_ magnified vibrant and so closely felt that it’s like she’s peeled some barrier away you didn’t even know was there, like she’s slipped you whole and trembling-new out of your skin and beneath her hard silvery gaze you’re flayed pure, carded, shredded, receptive, begging. “Please” - over and over again, you don’t know how you’re managing language but you can’t stop saying it and you don’t care how badly you’re lisping and the shame is gone, burned away and torn up in this - you don’t even know what you’re begging _for_ , only that she shouldn’t stop.

( _art by[mulattafury](http://soporsensuality.tumblr.com/post/44772424256/whoo-more-commission-stuff-mmmmfefsol-for)_ )

Her face blurs and shifts in your vision, and your mind has to swim slowly through explanations until you realize that there are overwhelmed tears in the way and what that means, what she’s done for you, and the salt stings against the crepe-thin skin at the corners of your eyes as you give in and close them, as she draws in and presses her wide black mouth against yours. It’s the slicing of her fangs into your lips as much as it’s the soft sliding of hers, it’s that when you offer her your tongue to bite her teeth are barely sensible little pinpricks, delicate and controlled, even as the curling of her bulge against yours goes faster and squeezes almost hard enough to hurt and one thin tendril stretches out into you, just one, usually it’s the spread and press of all of them, pushing and stroking like thin lithe fingers, but this time it reaches deep and low and your nook strains and clutches at it, that narrow slippery stimulation making you suddenly aware of how _empty_ you are. It’s so subtle and so _slow_ and trying to focus on it paradoxically makes everything _else_ tune in wonderful and scalding and overwhelming and you scream out loud into her mouth and your bulges thrash against hers in a long, hard, forceful release that hits you in waves.

You cling to her through it, shuddering, as drifting warmth suffuses through you under the harsh all-over pain, gauzy and translucent and a last tremor rocks you and you make soft grateful whimpers into her shoulder and knead with your fingers at the frondy edges of her bulge and that, that does it for Feferi - she collapses down heavy against your arm, letting out an unabashed noise that's half moan and half purr, gasping and squirming as her genetic material splashes into the water, spreads out around you in a slippery cloud.

And you know it'll pass, the sensation of everything being perfectly all right, as both of you lie in the water spent and panting and pressed skin to skin; the illusion will burst and dissolve, won't survive after you open your eyes again. But the other feeling, like you're finally present in your skin, no longer locked away from yourself - like you've let out a breath you were holding for two weeks - just might.


	3. Death by Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strange pulsations and finely honed electric crackles move through the enormous mass of grey matter. You wonder if electrocuting the giant brain would give the planet a seizure, and then you're not sure how you managed to have a thought so simultaneously horrifying and inane.
> 
> "Nice duds. I mean, the meninges and all. Pretty classic."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _He passed the stages of his age and youth_  
>  _Entering the whirlpool._  
>  \--T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

You actually drift into sleep for a while, Feferi's comforting weight still pressing you into the ablution trap; it's a numb doze, shallow like the water, hypnogogic voices making meaningless noise over a blank backdrop, the barely-aware passage of time. Not really dreaming. 

Until - it's like a dream but it isn't, it flows in familiar-strange and vertiginous and goes _through_ you and pools in your veins and you're jolting all over, icy-cold and white-hot, and you gasp out loud - snap eyes open - still stinging all over, though it's both damped and replaced with a kind of shivery tingling, and it doesn't feel the kind of good that it felt... however many minutes before, and you're awake and blinking - 

She's staring at you wide-eyed, propped above you. "Oh! Oh my cod! I'm sorry, I hadn't manta do that -"

"Do...?" You're still groggy, and you pull your head up and rub your eyes - or start to before you realize the water is filthy, and look at your fingers in mingled horror and pride instead. That's. Uh. Well. You're both going to need an _actual_ ablution, to say the least. 

FF's still babbling, blinking at you rapidly the way you've learned means she's nervous - "I was looking at you and I thought _wow you're a mess_ \- and I was thinking aboat, uh, exactly how is tonight going to go, we have to keep fighting shrimps and you're still injured and I didn't exactly kelp - and I was touching you and it just _happened_ -"

You lever yourself up in the tub a little, reach over to drain the nasty water out, look at yourself - yeah, the bright yellow flush where Eridan scorched you is faded from the skin of your arms and chest, though the cuts Feferi left with her claws are still there -

"Can I," she says, "can I try and heal you more?"

You've seen her answer game challenges with her life powers - there are things in the Land of Dew and Glass, trees which must grow branches across to the next challenge, wounded consorts who tell secrets when they're healed - but you've managed to avoid injury yourself. Until Eridan happened.

"What the shell, yeah. Go ahead." She giggles delightedly when you use one of her puns back at her and settles her palms on your chest - concentrates, fiercely, almost like she did while you were pailing - and you're not quite prepared for how it feels, sudden and startling and - somehow _alien, unnatural_ , but not _bad_ , just that the feeling spreading through your veins does not belong to you, it's like a dimension outside your body suddenly intersecting with it, like harsh sunlight spearing through cracks in a wall, and you imagine you can feel cells opening up to receive it, DNA being set to rights like a data solid being formatted. You remember dying to the Vast Glub and it's distinctly, _familiarly_ the opposite of that, like an audio track being played in reverse, and when you gasp and curse out loud you can _feel_ the oxygen permeating through your airsacs and you open your eyes on fading white afterimages and see marks closing up on your skin.

"Are you - did I -" Feferi looks down at her hands on your chest with a kind of resolute wariness, like she's not sure she trusts what just came out of them. She exhales softly.

"I'm fine," you tell her. "Everything's fine. Let's get clean."

~~~

The imp you've just demolished was huge. Huge and disturbing, shaped at the edges like something that makes your brain itch in an indescribable way. Feferi's planet looked more appetizing than yours for a while, but now that you've gotten a good look, you think you'd rather keep your brains and fire. 

Still, the obstacles aren't insurmountable. After she sweated it out for a while with her 2x3dent, you finally managed to land a precision beam, spearing through and reducing the monstrous enemy to code and grist, and now FF is looking at you speculatively. "Your ancestor - did he teach you that?" she asks, and you remember you were supposed to be talking about him more, and nod, still feeling odd and shy about the whole thing.

"Astris taught me a lot of things," you say, and then quickly, realizing you never said - "I gave him that name," and color rises to your cheeks. "He - had his title, the Psiioniic, but he felt like his wriggling name didn't - quite belong to him anymore -"

"You say it like you're making a confishion," FF says, quizzical, and you lower your eyes.

"I kind of feel like I am. I'm not sure I ever had the right." Half proud, half guilty; it feels like hubris to be proud, but it's something you _did_ for him, one of the few things you can point to and really feel that you entered his reality and gave him something _back_ \- 

"Whale, did he _want_ you to give him a name?" she asks.

"Yes," you say quickly. There's something about the way she talks sometimes: it _feels_ like she's being impatient at you, but she's not, really, you're starting to get a feel for that now; she's... you're not sure anything would actually, legitimately test the _patience_ of Feferi Peixes. It's more... like the trick of psionics you used to take out the imp, a pinpoint of focus, slicing through barriers, straight to what she's looking for. It makes you shiver; you're not certain you _could_ lie when she's like this, not because of force or pressure but because it would simply feel too bad. 

"Then of course you had the right. "

"I just." She sees through you, and suddenly, you see through yourself, through your protestations of inadequacy, and realize - "But really I was scared. Scared to ask the questions - scared to look deeper - scared to figure out if I could do more, because if I _could_ -" You remember moments in the dimness, avenues of questioning closed off. The way he let you off the hook; the way you allowed him to. And you did the thing he wanted most, anyway, at the very end; but you did it because of Aradia and because of fate and because of your voices, as much as anything else, you were not _his_ weapon, only Doom's; and your eyes fill with tears. "It's not even that I _know_ what I could have done, it's that I _don't_ \- because I hesitated, always, because I didn't truly believe - oh, god, what is coming out of my squawk gaper, I sound like a wrigglers' show - but I didn't believe _I_ could -"

"Sollux." Feferi catches your face in her hands, turns your chin to her and cradles vine-soft and iron-strong - "We are young." And when she says _we_ you realize she's thought about this before, the weight of the burdens she could take up - could have, before the world ended - "You would have arrived at it when you were ready. I just min-now it. You can think aboat a fin and plan toward it without making it happen _right now._ , and you would have realized that too."

"I _know_ that, though, that's obvious, I just -" 

"- hold yourshellf to higher standards than anyguppy else?" she interjects, just playful enough to catch you off-guard, and and there's that inescapable thing again; you know she's right, you can't look away from it, and tears spill down your cheeks and she presses her hands to your face like they were made to go there. Made for other things, too, you think; made to rule, to coax and to strike - 

"But I need to," you manage, "nobody else can, and when I think of that -" 

It's too much, it's just too much, and she whispers, "I _understand_ ," and you know as certain as death that she _does_ , and you wish you'd known her before the game - you would have had something to talk about then, too, helped each other bear up under the weight -

You cover her strong cool hand with yours, warmer and somehow softer than hers, differently textured, and you don't want to name what's taking shape, only _something_ is, undeniably, and you lean against her grateful for a moment that stretches timeless and soft before the next battle begins.

 

~~~

Your own planet is getting weirder and weirder. Or maybe it's your head. You suspect by the end you won't know the difference. Ha ha, brains and fire, so ironic. 

FF has gone back to deal with the Land of Dew and Glass; unlocking the last parts of the path to the Denizen is always tailored to the skills and weaknesses of the individual player, and it's safer for her and you both to go it alone. Every so often you check in with her on your - you've gotten into the habit of calling it a shell phone, her oceanic puns keep rubbing off on you - 

Right now you're following a stream through a narrow cavernous tunnel, the walls bone-pale and coated in weird branchy membrane, the water clear but oddly warm, salty to the taste and slippery on your fingers. A kind of faint thrumming pulse vibrates through the membrane every so often, like a very slow heartbeat. It's a long route, but it's safer than taking the final gate directly to Ananke's lair. 

You have a bit of an edge in these matters, both from game code and from the lore you've picked up on Derse and Prospit; though you wouldn't have chosen for yourself to participate in their intrigues, your ability to access both realms means that people keep asking you to carry messages and sneak around on their behalf. Probably about two thirds of the other players owe you favors at this point. It's not so bad.

The road is long and tiring to walk; you're saving your powers for the confrontation, and when you see the distance widening to a rounded, slightly triangular aperture, you know you're getting close. A kind of electric tension runs through the air here; or maybe it's just the effort of keeping your psionics contained. You're tired, but you're pushing forward. The sooner you make it through, the better.

Through thin membranous layers into the stifling closeness of the round cavern -

Strange pulsations and finely honed electric crackles move through the enormous mass of grey matter. The air around you is humid and sweltering, and you're wishing you _had_ just gone through the portal, if only so you could scuttle back out of here once you're finished with whatever it is you've come here to do. The denizen confrontations are strangely obfuscated in the code, governed by algorithms of which you can't predict the outputs. It'll be a matter of life or death, you know that much. It might or might not be a battle. You wonder if electrocuting the giant brain would give the planet a seizure, and then you're not sure how you managed to have a thought so simultaneously horrifying and inane.

"Nice duds. I mean, the meninges and all. Pretty classic." You're babbling, tired from your surreal journey, and you have no _clue_ how it's going to try to communicate back. Because you do know that much; the denizens are always supposed to talk before they try to kill you, if they do try to kill you. 

Then something gropes toward you feather-thin and faintly electric. You try to lash out, but it snares the back of your neck before you can move.

 _Sollux Captor_ , it says. _Hero of Doom. Now we speak._

It's pouring words into your thinkpan like you would pour mind honey into a jar, direct, immediate, and there's a sense in those words like the thing it's describing has already happened. Now we speak. Yes, we do.

The voice is like a chorus of voices, some of them in languages you know you don't know but somehow comprehend anyway, each contributing syllables, weaving in and out of clarity. It feels like going mad.

You're trying to articulate a question, something like _How does this go_ \- when it overrides you and answers before you're even done thinking of it. 

_You ask me questions, and I give you answers pertaining to the dead, and what you choose will decide who is dead._

There's something about that which nags at you. Not _decide who dies_ but _decide who is dead_ \- but it's lost in the disorientation and rage at having thoughts poured into your head, talking over your own; it's like what Vriska did and it makes your spine crawl and you almost throw the weird outreaching synapse off before you remember that strifing with your denizen is probably a _bad idea_ if you have another option -

"It's really fucking obnoxious," you say. "To think over me like that. Can you at least let me speak out loud first?" - and realize that Ananke is probably the sort of entity that takes things overly literally, and clarify, "Will you, please?"

\- and realize that you have an answer in its patient silence, that it knew - "...If you knew I would ask that, why were you - never mind. Fate stuff. Fuck. Okay."

Then you cut to the point, because it's all you can see- "How do we die?" But the Denizen doesn't answer. Something like laughter bubbles in through your nerves. You wait, decide it's not going to cough it up, and finally ask, "Do we win?"

 _Oh, yes, Mage of Doom, you win_ , Ananke says, mocking, and a chill runs down your spine. _If you accept your doom, you are doomed to win._

"If."

 _If_ , it confirms. 

"...but I've never heard a voice and then someone lived - not to my knowledge, anyway. You can't change fate, you can't escape doom - it doesn't - it doesn't work that way." You're hanging onto the comfort of hearing your own voice in the alienating weirdness of the humid pulsing skull-cavern.

_The road goes where it goes, but there are other roads._

Except where it - she? - says _are_ what you actually hear is a word that doesn't exist, some composite of meaning from shreds of is and was and will-be and is-not, and _roads_ suggests a parallel of quantum states and you realize that in all realities the amount of sideways skittery hoofbeastshit your brain is doing trying to track this conversation is going to give you a massive headache.

"You're telling me - that the things I've already seen don't have to happen. That what I thought was absolute is - not mutable exactly but that I can evade it."

 _Yours, as the hero of Doom,_ comes the sly voice into your mind: _to choose your doom or the doom of your doom. Every player gets a choice. That is yours._

"But there's a catch."

 _To refuse one set of consequences is to embrace another,_ Ananke says. _Passivity is also action. Everything has a price, an invisible exchange._

"What do I have to do to win your grist?" You're keenly aware that you're going to be one of the last to solve your planet, because you were the last to enter the Medium, and even with Feferi keeping pace with you for solidarity, it's not like she got in much earlier. 

_Find the key_ , Ananke says.

"The key." She doesn't repeat herself - you're thinking of Ananke as _she_ even though giant brain, right, because that kind of effortless self-composed power - "Is this some kind of, oh right, it _is_ some kind of glorified video game, you might as well call it the macguffin -"

 _But it **is** a key_ , she says, at once. 

"Like literally. A key."

_Yes._

"Like, piece of metal or plastic, goes in a door, _really?_ " You know sarcastic tone isn't enough to get you killed here, because you don't get killed _here_. Small mercies of knowing your fate.

_No. It is a key._

And no matter how you rant from that point on, Ananke is silent.

~~~

You dig through everything you have on your palmhusk, all your meticulous notes on the game, on words and themes that appear in the code and the comments: no dice. No mention of keys. Something is nagging at the back of your mind and you're trying to identify it, but you're too exhausted, and once or twice catch your mind drifting into half-sleep. Scraps of voices, no, the echoes of voices, rippling backward instead of forward in time - and you're trying to make out what they're saying -

Finally, defeated by your own body, you walk back out of the cavern and look for a place to curl up and rest. There's no sopor here and no dreamspace and you can barely make any kind of pile with the contents of your sylladex, random junk, t-shirts and data solids and some grist you captchalogued just to see what would happen; you curl yourself into as small of a space as possible on top of the meagre assemblage, nestled into a divot in the fleshy wall. But it's been too long, and sleep hits like a transit conveyance with the brakes cut anyway.

You dream:

You dream of flying.

Mass and acceleration, trajectory and timing -

At first it seems like - any old lead-up to a jump, the calculations and the movement - but everything is dragging, everything is so _difficult_ \- you're working through a mental fog, dazed and migraine-pained, every tiny adjustment so difficult, focusing through thick roaring head-noise, and at first don't understand _why_ \- 

You reach for auxiliary power and find a blank. Reach for computation banks to shuck off some of the cognitive load and nothing.

There's nothing to amplify you, nothing but your own powers, strong as they might be but still meager in the face of what they have to move - and you're not _him_ you're _you_ and, disorienting, disjoint from context, you don't understand why you have to be a starship and why you can't see - not that you need to see with your eyes, the reverberations of your psionics locate you in space, everything felt in intense proprioceptive outline, rock and atmosphere-bubble and the cold that threatens from outside - TZ and KK behind you and an enormous power source ahead of you and _where the hell is Feferi_ -

and your head hurts so much, hot like molten iron, something is wrong wrong _wrong_ and you know this and at the same time it's only Doom, it's only the known, the foregone conclusion - 

Jolting awake, in between, and turning over, the jagged stuttering thin sleep without sopor and without anyone to hold, but still you close your eyes again because you need the rest -

You sleep again and dream this time of Aradia, alive and winged and luminescent, singing to you softly, but you can't make out the words - 

You wake and can't return to sleep again, begin tooling around with your palmhusk to ease you into wakefulness, checking messages - decrypting - 

\- of course. Duh. _Obviously._ How did you miss that before, anyway? It should have been obvious what kind of key Ananke needed, only you were too tired and dazed from the long strange walk. You pore through the code notes again, and this time, it doesn't take you long to find reference to another Land, now that you know what you're looking for.

The problem is that what you're looking for doesn't actually exist, not in the alpha timeline. And there's only one way to get at that sort of nonexistent thing.

Time to troll AA.

TA: ii'm contactiing you on a hunch, let'2 2kiip the hoofbea2t2hiit thii2 tiime.  
TA: can you do a thiing for me wiith one of your crazy tiime dupliicate robot2?  
AA: y0u mean it is time t0 tell y0u ab0ut the d00med timelines where i wasted my denizen enc0unter 0n asking stupid questi0ns  
TA: ...iif they haven't happened, how do you remember them?  
TA: never miind, don't an2wer that.  
AA: it is 0k  
AA: i w0uld prefer if y0u did n0t understand this yet anyway  
AA: it makes y0ur ch0ice easier  
TA: ii don't know what you're talkiing about and iit'2 alarmiing me a liittle, but my braiin ii2 pooped the fuck out from talkiing two ak.  
TA: 2he'2 liike a walkiing miigraiine, except wiithout the walkiing.  
TA: becau2e 2he ii2 a giiant braiin iin the miiddle of braiin2viille.  
TA: iit'2 kiind of a joke, my planet ii2 a fuckiing braiin theme park liike iif troll walt dii2ney had a central nervou2 2y2tem fetii2h.  
TA: 2o how'2 the weather on LOQAM, oh waiit ii bet iit'2 0k.  
AA: yes it is  
TA: the lea2t you could do ii2 try not to ruiin ALL my punchliine2.  
AA: really  
AA: because i th0ught what y0u wanted was the inf0rmati0n i g0t fr0m my denizen  
TA: were you ju2t beiing 2narky wiith me.  
AA: i d0nt kn0w  
AA: i guess s0  
TA: ...wow. thank2, ii gue22.  
AA: anyway as y0u pr0bably kn0w  
AA: i 0nly remember this because 0f the inherent flexibility 0f time f0r me as c0mpared t0 0ther players  
AA: because the act 0f asking the questi0n d00med the timeline in which i asked it  
TA: waiit, hold up a miinute here, ii2 receiiviing the an2wer goiing two doom my tiimeliine?  
AA: n0  
AA: it 0nly d00med mine because it meant i c0uld n0t pr0ceed thr0ugh the denizen enc0unter n0rmally  
AA: because asking the questi0n effectively inv0ked a glitch that made my denizen h0stile and unkillable  
AA: f0rtunately after remembering 0ne instance 0f this d00med timeline i was able t0 time events s0 that y0u c0uld access the err0r message 

It's weird thinking of a doomed-timeline version of yourself, and downright unpleasant realizing that you were responsible for her death _again_ \- no, don't think about that, shut up Sollux brain go home.

AA: it referred t0 line 005732 in the game c0de

Code, now, that's always something good to think about. You think you remember the section that's from, and it's one of those oddly self-referential pieces that don't seem to connect to anything but are nonetheless necessary for everything else to run smoothly -

\- and yes, there's a comment on it that - well. You'll be damned. That could be an encryption key, all right. It's the right bit length for it and it doesn't seem to serve any _other_ purpose, and you hadn't noticed it before because SGRUB code comments are, as a rule, downright arcane.

TA: thank2, ii really appreciiate thii2.  
AA: 0k

If only she would say something - no, fuck this line of thought and the hoofbeast it rode in on. You have bigger brains to deal with than your own. You're pretty sure the comment has the key you're looking for, and if you're wrong, well, that's just another doomed timeline, right? It has a bunch of other stuff, too - something that looks like an encrypted message, but when you try to decrypt it with the key, it turns up garbage. 

Well, you can look at that again later. Right now you're getting to your feet, brushing off stickiness from the wall where you've been curled up, shoving things back into your sylladex. Ananke is waiting, and you step through the aperture.

The enormous synapse stretches out to you again, and you're prepared this time when it tingles into contact.

 _The key_ , Ananke says. And you think of the key. It's not terribly long; all of this code is so ancient, and you've always found it easy to remember sequences in binary. You begin reciting it in your mind, ones and zeroes. Realize, as you do, that it's slotting into place somehow, like data entered into a program - like there's something encrypted that it's about to decrypt - 

\- and breathlessly, as you finish the sequence and the cavern around you pixellates, unravels into messy blocks of light, you realize too that the game code making up _Ananke herself_ was in the form of encrypted data, so neatly disguised it is - was - like a palindrome, and you're decrypting _her_ , shattering her into brilliant faceted chunks of grist.

You stand and survey the results, and all you can think is that you are so _very_ relieved the realism of the grey-matter theme did not extend to what happened when your denizen chunked.

In what's probably the most 'current' of KK's memos - that time-transcendence feature is more trouble than it's worth sometimes - you leave a line.

TA: ii got the grii2t hoard, you can 2tart the alchemy party now.


	4. What the Thunder Said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He knows the future. He has premofishions." Feferi's fins flare as she turns to face Karkat, wide-eyed urgent behind her goggles, and another blackish cube drips off the end of her 2x3-dent and disappears as she gestures – "He never says anyfin unless it's _important_ , for glub's sake _listen_ to him!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I have heard the key_  
>  _Turn in the door once and turn once only_  
>  _We think of the key, each in his prison_  
>  _Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison_  
>  \--T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

Aradia dies and she dies and she dies, and you can't do anything about it: she made it that way; Time made it that way. 

She dies and she dies and every time you hate yourself a little more for not caring. She dies gloriously, throwing out nets of sparks that unite to form a vast protective umbra, and still there are more of her robotic ghost-selves. Each halo of psychic force only lasts seconds against the shockwave and each time another of her pops into being, an infinity of metallic time-clones, none of which understand you the way Aradia did once, lining up to sacrifice herself again and again for everyone, but it's not about _her_ , you have no doubt she'd throw any of the rest of you into the fray if that was necessary - 

In death she twists death to her purpose, becomes a fireworks display, a giant _fuck you_ into the aether.

And she dies and she dies, and you _don't_.

You're sickly conscious of what a near thing it is, how paper-thin your mind and body would be against the Black King if you were on the front lines, because the edge of that murmuring frequency still hits in lapping waves through the shield Aradia makes and you know the sound of death like no one else here does, know the sound of your _own_ death, of winking out like a blown transistor, falling blood-choked and graceless and insensible.

And right now you've done as much as you can in battle: made quite a dent in the overgrown chessman, throwing meteors back at him, but your head is throbbing, overheated and overspent, and you're sitting on the platform inside the shield trying to recover; TZ snuck up behind you the last time you had to come down and catch your breath, and hissed "I smell singed lookstubs, STOP before they run down your face like appleberry jam," and you think it was hyperbole but it coincided too closely with the premonitory wisp, _it isn't your time yet, not yet_ \- but even knowing that, it still makes you feel worthless, and so you're digging through screens of code on your husktop to distract yourself, trying to check and double-check and make sure all of you have everything right - 

"What _is_ mister grumpy doing anyway?" 

You look up with a start. You're pretty damn good at tuning out distractions. Terezi Pyrope is literally looming over your shoulder, sniffing, and before you can stop her she licks your screen. Great. Now it's all smeary, and you can barely make out the lines of code.

"Where does the loop start?" she asks, without preamble.

"What the shit do you mean, TZ? It's a loop. Loops don't start or end anywhere; they _loop_." But something's nagging at the back of your head as you say it. That odd timestamp...

"But isn't ~ATH code always hooked to endings?" 

"If you think I'm sitting here giving myself a migraine off the stray harmonics leaking from Derse Dude's cut-rate Glub out there so I can give you _tech support_ -"

"As a very wiseass troll once told me, calm your rumble spheres. I'm _trying_ to do the Seer Thing." Terezi contorts her face into an almost farcically serious expression and blocks your view of your husktop entirely then, scrolling the touchscreen with her nose. 

"Hey! Last I checked that was my husktop. As in not yours. As in just you wait until you hit one of the booby traps -" This section is gibberish anyway; you have no idea what she's even getting out of her snooping. 

"I'm not going to, dummy. They all smell like sulfur and ozone." She gets out of the way, though. "So if a loop doesn't start or end anywhere, is that the same thing as saying it starts and ends everywhere?" 

"I guess," you say, kind of distracted. You were trying to re-read the code governing the win conditions, and she somehow managed to hit a key somewhere that sent you to a completely different section - 

Hey, wait, this is the section you were thinking of just now, about Prospit and Derse and the algorithm that generates their prophecies.

You'll be damned. The code comment timestamp has changed and now it's giving today's date - using game-time notation in addition to the Alternian calendar, as if to rub it in your face. And the comment itself has changed, too. In addition to what was there before, now there's...

...a block of something encrypted.

It doesn't take much to arrive at the hunch that this encrypted chunk of code comment has something to do with the other encrypted chunk of code comment. You try pasting them together in both possible orders, but the key doesn't make sense of them until you string one of the comments back to front, and use an operator at the end that loops it with the other. _Then_ everything decrypts just fine. Fucking SGRUB code. 

And once you do that, you can read it plain as day. The comments are, themselves, a piece of code. 

More specifically, they're a game modification: a patch, a hack. 

"You smell like sudden flabbergasted discovery," TZ says.

"I'm not flabbergasted," you protest. "I'm just. Interested. I found a hidden bit of code."

"What does it _do_?"

You're still trying to figure that out, but you don't want to say so. "It modifies the game," you say. It's beginning to take shape in your mind, there's a bit that makes a portal open up and drills through reality, you're kind of used to that by now; but the most daunting part of it is the part that's supposed to reset _all_ the loops to a set point - you're not even sure that's possible, like TZ just said, a loop starts or ends anywhere it pleases, and how would it - but there's a line substitution in here, and - 

\- wait, this is madness, one of the things it's patching is _your mobius double reacharound virus_ , how, this code was written millennia before you ever -

There's a pressure change in the air, and Aradia's robot selves start to change formation like faraway flying mechanical ants. And you see Feferi coming back, Feferi who's the front-line fighter against the Black King because of her immunity to horrorterror psychic noise: for a moment you wonder if all is lost, but no, of all of you she is the least mussed, nearly impeccable, and there's pixellated gore on her 2x3dent.

"I think we've won," Feferi says, "I think we krilled him," and a blunted shockwave rumbles through - a front of doomed-timeline Aradias crumble under the force, and the next line takes up the shield - and around you the others are taking notice, starting to argue or celebrate -

But you hear - like an echo, at first, like you're hearing them twice except they're not saying the same things, you hear them.

Faintly approaching like the noise of distant engines, so quiet you'd usually miss it completely except that there's barely anyone else to listen to, you hear the voices of the people around you.

"If there were a prize awarded for accurately guessing the one troll here who would have his neural meatpile jammed so far up his nook that he wouldn't notice we'd won," KK says, "I would be rolling in so much grist right now that I would level up to gristillionnaire. Who pissed on your stack of sopor pies, is what I want to know."

"That's not a level and I think you're confusing me with GZ," you answer, staring distracted into the distance - no, his voice definitely isn't redoubled the way the others are -

Nepeta and Equius and Tavros and Vriska and Eridan and Feferi, oh, god, _Feferi_ , and your own thin and thready and exhausted in the distance -

A faint buzz of noise, so quiet you can barely make out - arguments and whispering and mundane indignities, giving no hint of the cause, making you wonder if you're imagining it - No, making you try to _justify_ the thought that you're imagining it, so you won't have to speak up, won't have to face this. But you _know_ , you always know the difference - back on Alternia you could probably have been culled for attempting to explain the distinct frequency difference between an auditory hallucination and the voices of the doomed, like some kind of bizarre pompous thinkpan-noise connoisseur, but it's there and it's real.

And Feferi promised she'd believe you.

"We can't win," you say out loud.

"We _did_ win, you miserable moody chute-huffing gloomsack -"

"No. That's not what I mean. We have to -" You're doing that thing again, the thing where you stumble over words because you're sure no one will believe you. Feferi promised, and she's looking at you now, sharp-eyed and expectant, and you raise your voice and try to modulate it to something other people could take seriously. "Incoming fucking transmission, okay. If we win, a lot of us will _die_. This isn't going as planned."

"What do you _mean_ \- all the time I spent bailing water off Kanaya's planet and frogsitting -" Karkat complains.

You're remembering things your denizen said to you, _doomed to win_ and _your doom or the doom of your doom_ and you're compiling code as they speak over your head -

"He knows the future. He has premofishions." Feferi's fins flare as she turns to face Karkat, wide-eyed urgent behind her goggles, and another blackish cube drips off the end of her 2x3-dent and disappears as she gestures – "He never says anyfin unless it's _important_ , for glub's sake _listen_ to him!"

"But we're on the verge of entering a new universe, one that, I might add, I sweated for, I bred frogs until my eyes crossed and my horns turned inside out -" You almost say _not that anyone would notice, KK_ but you're trying to focus, between the voices in your head and making sure you're not skipping any steps, and you're not going to get into it with him right now. "And now you're saying it's never going to exist."

"And what, you'd rather everyone die?" FF says sharply - 

\- compiled, your finger hovering, and you remember the spectre of a white-haired hornless girl, saying, _You can flip the chessboard,_ and you know it'll be too late if you wait for everyone to decide. You have to act unilaterally. 

You run the file.

The thing that appears in the air is luminous, a crack in the world, shaped like one of the Gates that link your worlds except inverted, the fine tracery of circles lining a tunnel through space and time, the webwork of points turned out, and a cold wind blows across the face of the platform.

Terezi prods at the edge of the shape with the base of her cane – the arcs and points hover unchanged in midair – and finally breaks the silence. "It smells like retroactive continuity," she says.

"What the globeslurping fresh hell is that supposed to mean," Karkat says.

The others are returning from the front line as you speak. The first of Aradia's robot selves - you think she must be the one from the alpha timeline by the way the others look at her, but you're not sure - touches down and faces the portal and then turns to you -

A metal hand on your shoulder, like she means to pap you and doesn't know how, and you think you stop breathing for a moment -

"It would have been good," she says in her metallic, distant voice, "but not _worth_ it." And you open your mouth to speak, not sure what you're going to say, but then she lifts off, thrusters crackling, and flies through the portal. Another one of her follows, then another, and you're all left watching the stream of Aradiabots disappearing through the weird recursion-hole in game reality.

Equius speaks up then in his booming baritone. You hadn't realized he was back. "Where she goes," he says, "I will follow." You hadn't realized he was back. He looks like a poster for some second-rate _Trollbarians!_ game grub that can't decide whether it's meant to be self-insertion or fanservice, sweating through a torn shirt with his normally impeccable hair mussed, and you normally kind of resent him but right now you're just glad to see the consensus shifting. Feferi has come to stand next to you and caught you by the wrist.

"And here I thought you were going to ask me to order you around," Karkat grumbles, and EQ looks poleaxed. 

Nepeta is darting up behind him, her bloody artificial claws retracting with a wicked _snick_. "What's yowl this?"

Feferi presses your wrist as she answers. "It's a change of plans."

"That we're still debating over," KK says, but he sounds uncertain.

"There isn't much time," you say out loud. You feel something in the air - no, something in your head, call it what it is; but you're sure of it, and now that you've spoken up you're not going to back down - 

"Well, friendleader," Feferi says to Karkat, "stop carping and lead us, you know everyfin you need to -" while at the same time Nepeta is saying to him, "I go where my meowrail goes, please, let's not split up the clowder -"

"Fine, let's _go_ ," Karkat says, "but if everything goes to rancid mammoth droppings it will be forever on record that we did it on the advice of this walking warped data solid," and glares at you, and you think for a moment that he's going to go on a tangent airing your romantic dirty laundry with him but he doesn't.

The parade of Aradiabots flying through slows to a trickle and finally one last half-broken timeclone throws herself in, leaving the portal full of whistling empty dark.

Eridan wanders in from the edge of the group, still trying to act like he's preoccupied with cleaning that ridiculous fucking harpoon gun - it's not pointed at you, thank god - and glares into the gateway as if the Aradiabots' choice makes the prospect of following even more distasteful to him.

"I don't believe this," ED says, drawling out the V in that weird way he has. "I'm not gonna give up everything we worked for because this dirtscrapin mustardblood meddler of a wwannabe engineer says MMFFFF-" 

Karkat just stretches his arm up and shoves Eridan's ugly hipster scarf in his mouth. He yanks on the seadweller's hand, and it can't possibly be simple physical strength that pushes him through the portal, maybe sheer startlement, but ED trips and rolls through and vanishes, with KK following just behind.

Equius ducks through the portal and Nepeta takes a running leap close on his heels. Kanaya watches them and leans toward Terezi, flicking her eyes toward you – "So you really See...?" Terezi nods, but Kanaya still hesitates; starts to lock her chainsaw in her sylladex but instead holds it braced in one hand as she steps through.

"Heh, I don't see whyyyyyyyy everyone believes you," Vriska says, bending over your head as if she's telling a secret, but loud and obnoxious as ever. "You're just trying to keep the new universe for yourself, am I right? But I'm onto you. Well! At least those losers are gone. Hey, Pupa! Looks like we get to split the spoils!" She attempts to loom over Tavros. He propels his hoverchair up a notch, leaving her staring at his chin. "And maybe some for you, too, Pyrope. Just like old times. Go on, the rest of you get out of here, the jig is up." Terezi seems equally unimpressed.

You'd like to shove a wave of force into her stupid smirking face, but you're avoiding that because you're not sure if her mind control would work on you right now. Feferi glares at Vriska and _hisses_. It's a frightening sound even if you're not the target, layered with frequencies that hurt to hear, and you wince and rub your temples. "Shore-ry," she whispers to you. "But she's at least got one fin right. We'd betta get out of here." 

"I'm not sure if the portal will stay open after I bring my husktop through, so I'm not leaving until everyone else is gone," you tell FF, quietly, the explanation you don't owe to Vriska. 

Feferi draws herself up to the fullness of her still-small height and speaks in a voice that rings like a bell. "We may not know where this portal will lead, but the alternative will get some of us krilled! Our race is small enough as it is. I speak not because I would have led that race, once, but from the desire to preserve it. Time is short." As she speaks the crashing death throes of the Black King are fading to a faint susurrus. "Sollux knows the cod of this game betta than anyone else. Go forward now. Or get your wrasse out of the way." 

Vriska makes a big show of bored applause. "Oh, pep talks now! Please. Wait, you always were fond of those. Maybe because you don't have snazzier ways to influence people." 

Terezi looks sad for a moment, then grins. "Smell you on the other side," she says, squares her shoulders and vanishes through the portal. 

"I'm not all up and thinking I'm the smartest one here, Tavbro," Gamzee says, "but it would be a motherfuckin' shame to miss out on whatever new miracle everyone is getting on to seeing, is how I feel it. Yeah?"

"Uh. Yeah," Tavros says, a lot more seriously, and, "You first." You privately think that is clever of him: GZ could get lost in his own recuperacoon. 

The highblood gives a big silly grin and rolls his shoulders in a shrug, and then grabs the pointy front end of Tavros' hoverchair. "Got your nose!" He tugs Tavros in after him.

And then it's you and Feferi and Vriska. 

 

You don't know exactly what will happen to Vriska if she doesn't step through with the rest of you. The temporospatial hole should go through to a different iteration of the universe, you know that much - will there be a Vriska there, if not this one? 

You're not inclined to care too much. Voices are doing a strange thing now, simultaneously present and absent, like the continuity lines that draw them to you have been disrupted, but now you're hearing all three of the people present including yourself, and the context is rapid-changing scrambling like the hack is glitching something about this timeline. You need to get out of here, and you're starting to recognize it in your gut as well as in your head. "FF, let's go," you hiss.

"You don't have to do this," she's saying to Vriska. "I'm not clamming that I pike you, but you don't deserve to be left behind -"

"You're just too cluckbeast to lead!" Vriska says. "Buck- _aw_ , buck- _aw_! God, it's _soooooooo_ obvious. Go on and run away with the rest of these suckers if you're so determined. I'm not going to pass up the chance to be the sole god of a new universe." She flips her hair and turns away, resolute. There's a last murmuring rumble of wrongness and the fallen Black King finally goes, literally, dead silent.

A crack splinters thunderous through the air, and across the platform the door to a new universe is glimmering into existence. A timer in your head counts down precious seconds. And you grab Feferi's hand. 

Vriska is still cackling, now behind your back. You ignore her and dive through the inside-out spirograph with Feferi just as the scent of ozone rises and the fabric of reality starts to waver where you are - where you _were_ , because now you're - you're - 

\- you're waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> INTERMISSION OVER! And if we never have to wrangle a Hivebent timeline again it'll be too soon. Next up, _Wires and Stars: Consummation_ should start posting in a week or two. THE STORY MOVES ON!
> 
> Meanwhile, remember, comments are the manna of the gods, and keep us going through barren deserts.
> 
> Also: do you have a fantroll? Are you planning (or have you already done) fanart or other fanworks for or related to Wires and Stars? [Your fantroll can be in our story!](http://tatterdemalionamberite.tumblr.com/post/52976793593/fantroll-cameos) \- more than that, we really need 'em for all kinds of bit characters who will be working on the periphery to help or hinder the protagonists. So please let us know if you want to participate, and we'll have a submission form up shortly!
> 
> (If you've done art for us and don't have a fantroll, please let us know if you want to give away your fantroll cameo and we'll find a good home for it.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully the summary, and Chapter 17 of Initiation, answer any driving questions you might have about what's going on with the state of the universe, at least in a general sense.
> 
> But if not, remember you can feel free to ask us at any time - in comments here, or privately on [our](http://tatterdemalionamberite.tumblr.com) [Tumblrs](http://titianarchivist.tumblr.com).


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